Digital scholarship blog

“The bats have left the bell tower, the victims have been bled”  - Happy Friday the 13^th to those of you with gothic sensibilities! I’ve been enjoying singing along to the wonderful CHVRCHES cover of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” originally by Bauhaus, while preparing for the Gaming the Gothic conference, which takes place at the University of Sheffield today, and where @GamingTheGothic have promised both cake and badges!

I am giving a paper on the Off the Map videogame design competition, which accompanied the British Library’s exhibition ‘Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination’, which in 2014 celebrated 250 years of gothic literature and culture, starting from the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.

The Off The Map competition challenged higher education students based in the UK to create videogames inspired by the British Library’s collections and in 2014 three students from University of South Wales created a winning underwater game where the player rebuilds Fonthill Abbey, the once-stunning Gothic revival country house in Wiltshire home to author William Beckford, which was demolished in 1846 after the collapse of its spectacular 300-foot tower twenty years earlier.

Image from 2014 Off the Map winning game Nix

Image taken from "Delineations of Fonthill and its Abbey", by John Rutter; published by the author, 1823 (BL 191.e.6-81)

The winning team used images, maps of the estate and sounds held in the British Library’s collections to create Nix; a game for the first generation Oculus Rift, a revolutionary virtual reality headset for 3D gaming. Tim Pye, curator of the British Library’s exhibition Terror and Wonder, said this about their entry:

“What is so impressive about the Nix game is the way in which it takes the stunning architecture of the Abbey, combines it with elements from its troubled history and infuses it all with a very ghostly air. The game succeeds in transforming William Beckford’s stupendously Gothic building into a magical, mysterious place reminiscent of the best Gothic novels.”

Keeping the gothic flames burning in 2018 and to mark the 200^th year anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, the British Library’s Digital Scholarship team is pleased to be collaborating on Gothic Novel Jam with Read Watch Play; an online reading group that has monthly themes. Last year we partnered on Odyssey Jam and it was inspiring to see the end results, which I blogged about here.

To get involved in Gothic Novel Jam participants need to make something creative inspired by the gothic novel genre. Then by the 31st July upload or share it on the itch.io Gothic Novel Jam site. Entries can include stories, poetry, art, games, music, films, pictures, soundscapes, or any other type of digital media response.

Gothic Novel Jam, #GothNovJam, promotional postcard

As part of the jam we want participants to use images from the British Library Flickr account as inspiration for submissions. They’re freely available for anyone to use and the following albums may be particularly inspiring:

• Ghosts and Ghoulish scenes
• Architecture
• Castles
• Children's Book illustrations

However, don't feel limited to using just those images, the full list of albums can be found here. There are also the Off the Map Gothic Collections of images on Wikimedia Commons and sounds on SoundCloud, which you are free to use. If you want to learn more about the gothic genre and it's authors, check out this hugely informative section of the Discovering Literature website.

Although the gothic novel is the main jam theme, we’ll also be announcing a sub-theme on the 1^st July, so please follow the #GothNovJam hashtag on social media for more news and also to see what others are creating for the jam. Good luck and have fun!

Button badges made for the Gaming the Gothic conference, really hope I get a #CakeAndDeath one!

This post is by resident goth, Digital Curator Stella Wisdom, on twitter as @miss_wisdom.

Do you live in or near Nottingham and are you available on Wednesday 3 Feb between 1230 - 1600? Come along to the FREE UK @BL_Labs Roadshow event at GameCity and The National Video Game Arcade, Nottingham (we have some places left and booking is essential for anyone interested).

BL Labs Roadshow at GameCity and The National Video Game Arcade, Nottingham, hosted by the Digital Humanities and Arts (DHA) Praxis project based at the University of Nottingham, Wed 3 Feb (1230 - 1600)

• Discover the digital collections the British Library has, understand some of the challenges of using them and even take some away with you.
• Learn how researchers found and revived forgotten Victorian jokes and Political meetings from our digital archives.
• Understand how special games and computer code have been developed to help tag un-described images and make new art.
• Find out about a tool that links digitised handwritten manuscripts to transcribed texts and one that creates statistically representative samples from the British Library’s book collections.
• Consider how the intuitions of a DJ could be used to mix and perform the Library's digital collections.
• Talk to Library staff about how you might use some of the Library's digital content innovatively.
• Get advice, pick up tips and feedback on your ideas and projects for the 2016 BL Labs Competition (deadline 11 April) and Awards (deadline 5 September). 

Our hosts are the Digital Humanities and Arts (DHA) Praxis project at the University of Nottingham who are kindly providing food and refreshments and will be talking about two amazing projects they have been involved in:

ArtMaps: Putting the Tate Collection on the map

Dr Laura Carletti will be talking about the ArtMaps project which is getting the public to accurately tag the locations of the Tate's 70,000 artworks.

The 'Wander Anywhere' free mobile app developed by Dr Benjamin Bedwell.

Dr Benjamin Bedwell, Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham will talk about the free mobile app he developed called 'Wander Anywhere'.  The mobile software offers users new ways to experience art, culture and history by guiding them to locations where it downloads stories intersecting art, local history, architecture and anecdotes on their mobile device relevant to where they are.

For more information, a detailed programme and to book your place, visit the Labs and Digital Humanities and Arts Praxis Workshop event page.

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

The BL Labs project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Labs Roadshow at #citylis London, Mon 1 Feb (5pm-7.30pm)

Live in or near North-East London and are available on Monday 1 Feb between 1700 - 1930? Come along to the first FREE UK Labs Roadshow event of 2016 (we have a few places left and booking is essential for anyone interested) and:

#citylis at the Department for Information Science, City University London,
the first BL Labs Roadshow event Mon 1 Feb (1700 - 1930)

• Discover the digital collections the British Library has, understand some of the challenges of using them and even take some away with you.
• Learn how researchers found and revived forgotten Victorian jokes and Political meetings from our digital archives.
• Understand how special games and computer code have been developed to help tag un-described images and make new art.
• Talk to Library staff about how you might use some of the Library's digital content innovatively.
• Get advice, pick up tips and feedback on your ideas and projects for the 2016 BL Labs Competition (deadline 11 April) and Awards (deadline 5 September). 

Our first hosts are the Department for Information Science (#citylis) at City University London. #citylis have kindly organised some refreshments, nibbles and also an exciting student discussion panel about their experiences of working on digital projects at the British Library, who are:

#citylis student panel.
Top-left, Ludi Price 
Top-right, Dimitra Charalampidou
Bottom-left, Alison Pope
Bottom-right, Daniel van Strien

• Ludi Price, a PhD student in Information Science at the university who works as a Far Eastern Languages cataloguer at the SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on the digital information behaviour of fans and fan practices in the library world and she will talk about participating in the International Games Day at your Library, held at the British Library.
• Dimitra Charalampidou, a graduate of Library Science and Information Systems at the Alexander Technological Institute of Thessalonki (A.Te.I.Th.), Greece and a British Library Labs Erasmus funded trainee (2015). Her work included uploading over 9000 digitised bookbindings to Wikimedia Commons (see also Untold lives blog posting - 'Spell Binding') as part of her dissertation and supporting the Crossroads of Curiosity project and event with artist David Normal.
• Alison Pope, a recent student of Information Science at #citylis with a particular interest in digital information technology architectures, data visualisation and sport informatics. She is a Business Analyst in Information Technology Services at the University of Reading and has worked with researchers on a variety of digital scholarship projects.
• Daniel van Strien, a #citylis student who also works as an Assistant Librarian at Newcomb Library, Homerton University Hospital. He has recently worked on research around funders who are moving to open access and facilitated a workshop on ‘Library Carpentry’ at City teaching Librarians how to use version control.

For more information, a detailed programme and to book your place (essential), visit the BL Labs Workshop at #citylis event page.

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

The BL Labs project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Today the Labs team is launching the fourth annual Competition and Awards for 2016. Please help us spread the word by tweeting, re-blogging, and telling anyone who might be interested!

British Library Labs Competition 2016

The annual Competition is looking for transformative project ideas which use the British Library’s digital collections and data in new and exciting ways. Two Labs Competition finalists will be selected to work 'in residence' with the BL Labs team between May and early November 2016, where they will get expert help, access to the Library’s resources and financial support to realise their projects.

Winners will receive a first prize of £3000 and runners up £1000 courtesy of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at the Labs Symposium on 7th November 2016 at the British Library in London where they will showcase their work.

The deadline for entering is midnight British Summer Time (BST) on 11th April 2016.

Labs Competition winners from previous years have produced an amazing range of creative and innovative projects. For example:

(Top-left) Adam Crymble's Crowdsource Arcade and some specially developed games to help with tagging images
(Bottom-left) Katrina Navickas' Political Meetings Mapper and a photo from a Chartist re-enactment 
(Right) Bob Nicholson's Mechanical Comedian

• Adam Crymble's 'Crowdsourcing Arcade' (2015) experimented with crowdsourcing, specifically the tagging of the British Library's Flickr Commons images, through the use of a 1980s-style arcade game machine installed with specially designed games to help with tagging images.
• Katrina Navickas’ 'Political Meetings Mapper' (2015) used text mining and geo-location to find records of when and where political meetings took place in the Library's digitised newspapers, enabling anyone to access them on maps and explore the data on an interactive website.
• Bob Nicholson’s Victorian Meme Machine (2014) created a database of Victorian jokes from the Library's digital archives and reviving this humour through social media such as twitter and via the 'Mechanical Comedian'.

A further range of inspiring and creative ideas have been submitted in previous years and some have been developed further.

British Library Labs Awards 2016

The annual Awards, introduced in 2015, formally recognises outstanding and innovative work that has been carried out using the British Library’s digital collections and data. This year, they will be commending work in four key areas:

• Research - A project or activity which shows the development of new knowledge, research methods, or tools.
• Commercial - An activity that delivers or develops commercial value in the context of new products, tools, or services that build on, incorporate, or enhance the Library's digital content.
• Artistic - An artistic or creative endeavour which inspires, stimulates, amazes and provokes.
• Teaching / Learning - Quality learning experiences created for learners of any age and ability that use the Library's digital content.

A prize of £500 will be awarded to the winner and £100 for the runner up for each category at the Labs Symposium on 7th November 2016 at the British Library in London, again courtesy of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The deadline for entering is midnight BST on 5th September 2016.

The Awards winners for 2015 produced a remarkable and varied collection of innovative projects in  Research, Creative/Artistic, Entrepreneurship categories and a special Jury's prize:

(Top-left) Spatial Humanities research group at the University Lancaster plotting mentions of disease in newspapers on a map in Victorian times,
(Top-right) A computer generated work of art, part of 'The Order of Things' by Mario Klingemann,
(Bottom-left) A bow tie made by Dina Malkova inspired by a digitised original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland
(Bottom-right) Work on Geo-referencing maps discovered from a collection of digitised books at the British Library that James Heald is still involved in.

• Research: “Representation of disease in 19th century newspapers” by the Spatial Humanities research group at Lancaster University analysed the British Library's digitised London based newspaper, The Era through innovative and varied selections of qualitative and quantitative methods in order to determine how, when and where the Victorian era discussed disease.
• Creative / Artistic:  “The Order of Things” by Mario Klingemann involved the use of semi-automated image classification and machine learning techniques in order to add meaningful tags to the British Library’s one million Flickr Commons images, creating thematic collections as well as new works of art.
• Entrepreneurship: “Redesigning Alice” by Dina Malkova produced a range of bow ties and other gift products inspired by the incredible illustrations from a digitised British Library original manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll and sold them through the Etsy platform and in the Alice Pop up shop at the British Library in London.
• Jury's Special Mention: Indexing the BL 1 million and Mapping the Maps by volunteer James Heald describes both the work he has led and his collaboration with others to produce an index of 1 million 'Mechanical Curator collection' images on Wikimedia Commons from the British Library Flickr Commons images. This gave rise to finding 50,000 maps within this collection partially through a map-tag-a-thon which are now being geo-referenced.

A further range of inspiring work has been carried out with the British Library's digital content and collections.

If you are thinking of entering, please make sure you visit our Competition and Awards archive pages for further details.

Finally, if you have a specific question that can't be answered through these pages, feel free to contact us at [email protected], or why not come to one of the 'BL Labs Roadshow 2016' UK events we have scheduled between February and April 2016 to learn more about our digital collections and discuss your ideas?

We really look forward to reading your entries!

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs.

The British Library Labs project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The third annual BL Labs Symposium took place on Monday 2^nd November 2015 and the event was a great success!

The Labs Symposiums showcase innovative projects which use the British Library's digital content and provide a platform for development, networking and debate in the Digital Scholarship field.

The videos for the event are available here.

This year’s Symposium commenced with a keynote from Professor David De Roure, entitled “Intersection, Scale and Social Machines: The Humanities in the digital world”, which addressed current activity in digital scholarship within multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary frameworks.

 Professor David De Roure giving the Symposium keynote speech

Caroline Brazier, the Chief Librarian of the British Library, then presented awards to the two winners of the British Library Labs Competition (2015) – Dr Adam Crymble and Dr Katrina Navickas, both lecturers of Digital History at the University of Hertfordshire.  

(L-R): Caroline Brazier, Chief Librarian; Competition winners Katrina Navickas and Adam Crymble; Dr Adam Farquhar, Head of Digital Scholarship 

After receiving their awards, it was time for Adam and Katrina to showcase their winning projects.

Adam’s project, entitled “Crowdsourcing Arcade: Repurposing the 1980s arcade console for scholarly image classification”, takes the crowdsourcing experience off the web and establishes it in a 1980s-style arcade game.

Presentation by Dr Adam Crymble, BL Labs Competition (2015)  winner 

Katrina’s project, “Political Meetings Mapper: Bringing the British Library maps to life with the history of popular protest”, has developed a tool which extracts notices of meetings from historical newspapers and plots them on layers of historical maps from the British Library's collections.

Presentation by Dr Katrina Navickas, BL Labs Competition (2015)  winner 

After lunch, the Symposium continued with Alice's Adventures Off the Map 2015 competition, produced and presented by Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library. Each year, Off the Map challenges budding designers to use British Library digital collections as inspiration to create exciting interactive digital media.

The winning entry was "The Wondering Lands of Alice", created by Off Our Rockers, a team of six students from De Montfort University in Leicester: Dan Bullock, Freddy Canton, Luke Day, Denzil Forde, Amber Jamieson and Braden May.

Video: Alice's Adventures Off the Map 2015 competition winner 'The Wondering Lands of Alice'

This was followed by the presentations of the British Library Labs Awards (2015), a session celebrating BL Labs’ collaborations with researchers, artists and entrepreneurs from around the world in the innovative use of the British Library's digital collections.

The winners were: 

BL Labs Research Award (2015) – “Combining Text Analysis and Geographic Information Systems to investigate the representation of disease in nineteenth-century newspapers”, by The Spatial Humanities project at Lancaster University: Paul Atkinson, Ian Gregory, Andrew Hardie, Amelia Joulain-Jay, Daniel Kershaw, Cat Porter and Paul Rayson.  

The award was presented to one of the project collaborators, Ian Gregory, Professor of Digital Humanities at Lancaster University.

Professor Ian Gregory  receiving the BL Labs Research Award (2015), on behalf of the Spatial Humanties project, from Dr Aquiles Alencar-Brayner

BL Labs Creative/Artistic Award (2015) – “The Order of Things” by Mario Klingemann, New Media Artist.

Mario Klingemann receiving the BL Labs Creative/Artistic Award (2015) from Nora McGregor

BL Labs Entrepreneurial Award (2015) –“Redesigning Alice: Etsy and the British Library joint project” by Dina Malkova, designer and entrepreneur.

Dina Malkova receiving the BL Labs Entrepreneurial Award (2015) from Dr Rossitza Atanassova

Jury’s Special Mention Award – “Indexing the BL 1 million and Mapping the Maps” by James Heald, Wikipedia contributor.

James Heald receiving the Jury's Special Mention Award (2015) from Dr Mia Ridge

The Symposium concluded with a thought provoking panel session, “The Ups and Downs of Open”, chaired by George Oates, Director of Good, Form & Spectacle Ltd. George was joined by panelists Dr Mia Ridge, Digital Curator at the British Library, Jenn Phillips-Bacher, Web Manager at the Wellcome Library, and Paul Downey, Technical Architect at the Government Digital Service (GDS). The session discussed the issues, challenges and value of memory organisations opening up their digital content for use by others. 

Panel session (L-R): George Oates; Jenn Phillips-Bacher; Paul Downey; Mia Ridge

The BL Labs team would like to thank everyone who attended and participated in this year’s Symposium, making the event the most successful one to date – and we look forward to seeing you all at next year’s BL Labs Symposium on Monday 7th of November 2016!

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs.

The British Library Labs Project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The BL Labs team are excited to announce that the third annual British Library Labs Symposium (2015) is taking place on Monday 2^nd November 2015, from 09:30 –17:00 in the British Library Conference Centre, St Pancras. The event is free, although you must book a ticket. Don’t delay, as last year’s event was a sell out!

The Symposium showcases innovative projects which use the British Library’s digital content, and provides a platform for development, networking and debate in the Digital Scholarship field.

This year, Dr Adam Farquhar, Head of Digital Scholarship at the British Library, will launch the Symposium. This will be followed by a keynote from Professor David De Roure, Professor of e-Research at the University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre. The British Library’s Chief Librarian, Caroline Brazier, will then present awards to the two British Library Labs Competition (2015) winners, who will follow with presentations on their winning projects.

After lunch, Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library, will announce the winners of the Alice’s Adventures Off the Map competition, which challenged budding designers to use British Library digital collections as inspiration in the creation of exciting interactive digital media.

Following, the winners will be announced of the British Library Labs Awards (2015), which recognises projects that have used the British Library’s digital content in exciting and innovative ways. Presentations will be given by the winners in each of the Awards’ three categories: Research, Creative/Artistic and Entrepreneurial.  

The afternoon will end with a thought provoking panel session discussing the issues of opening up digital content for memory organisations, chaired by George Oates, Director of Good, Form & Spectacle Ltd.

The Symposium will conclude with a networking reception in the Chaucer and Foyer area.

Don’t forget to book your place for the Symposium today!

For any further information, please contact [email protected]

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs.

The British Library Labs Project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

A couple of months ago I blogged about the 2014 Off the Map competition winners announcement at GameCity9 Festival. Well, since then two of the winning teams have demonstrated their games at the British Library for International Games Day at Your Library. Seeing the Oculus Rift set up in the Library was brilliant!

Furthermore, I'm pleased that these two teams have now made their games available as free downloads.

The  2014 first place game Nix was created by Jackson Rolls-Gray, Sebastian Filby and Faye Allen from the University of South Wales. Using a virtual reality Oculus Rift headset, the game challenges players to reconstruct Fonthill Abbey via collecting hidden and moving glowing orbs in a spooky underwater world.

You can follow instructions to download Nix here (note: you will need your own Oculus Rift headset to play it). If you don't have an Oculus Rift, then you can see a flythrough of their game on YouTube:

The second game is from one of the 2014 runners up, team Shady Agents, also from the University of South Wales, who have released their Edgar Allan Poe-inspired game Beneath the Crimson Moon here. 

Image from Beneath The Crimson Moon

After the delights of the 2014 competition connected to our exhibition Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination. The  2015 Off the Map competition is linked to the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and is fittingly called 'Alice's Adventures Off the Map'. Curators have selected an amazing range of maps, photographs, texts, sounds and illustrations, which we are keen to share with Off the Map participants.  

'Alice's Adventures Off the Map' will be launched at the British Library on Monday 8 December 2014, at one of the Digital Research team's free evening Digital Conversation events. If you would like to come along to find out more, please book here.

Stella Wisdom
Curator, Digital Research

@miss_wisdom

Last night was the award ceremony at Nottingham Contemporary art gallery for the Off the Map 2014 competition, a partnership project with GameCity and Crytek. Now in its second year, Off the Map challenges UK Higher Education students to make videogames based on British Library collection items using Crytek's CRYENGINE software. Furthermore, for 2014, the competition had a gothic theme to accompany the British Library's current exhibition Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, which is open until Tuesday 20 January 2015 and is well worth a visit.

I've created a video, which you can see below, showing flythrough footage of last year's winning entry from Pudding Lane Productions, De Montfort University, Leicester. It also gives details of the 2014 gothic sub-themes and shows flythrough clips from this year's shortlisted entries.

The jury were impressed by the quality and creativity of the submitted entries, so there was passionate debate regarding the deciding the 2014 shortlist! The third winning entry was Team Shady Agents from University of South Wales in Newport with their Edgar Allan Poe inspired game Crimson Moon. The second winning entry was Team Flying Buttress from De Montfort University, who created a visually rich interpretation of Dracula's Whitby. 

I was delighted that British Library Chief Executive Roly Keating announced the winning entry:  Nix, this was created by Jackson Rolls-Gray, Sebastian Filby and Faye Allen from the University of South Wales. Using Oculus Rift, a revolutionary virtual reality headset for 3D gaming; it challenges players to reconstruct Fonthill Abbey via collecting hidden and moving glowing orbs in a spooky underwater world. You can see a flythrough of their game below:

My colleague Tim Pye, curator of Terror and Wonder and a member of this year's Off the Map jury, said: “The original architectural model of Fonthill Abbey is currently on display in Terror and Wonder.  What is so impressive about the Nix game is the way in which it takes the stunning architecture of the Abbey, combines it with elements from its troubled history and infuses it all with a very ghostly air.  The game succeeds in transforming William Beckford’s stupendously Gothic building into a magical, mysterious place reminiscent of the best Gothic novels.”

Nix also impressed fellow jury member Scott Fitzgerald, Crytek's CRYENGINE Sandbox Product Manager he said: “With the theme of Fonthill Abbey, the winning team took the fantasy route and twisted the story into something fresh and completely different.  The mechanics used to progress through the game and the switching between the two realities make a very interesting experience for the player.”

I'd like to thank this year's jury members: Tim Pye, Tom Harper, Kim Blake and Scott Fitzgerald. I also want to thank all of this year's Off the Map participating teams, far from being a terror, it has been a delight to follow the students' work via their blogs and YouTube channels.

Plans are currently underway for the third competition: "Alice's Adventures Off the Map", which will be launched at the British Library on Monday 8 December 2014, at one of the Digital Research team's Digital Conversation events. If you would like to come along to find out more, book here.

Stella Wisdom

Curator, Digital Research

@miss_wisdom